Recipe: Thai beef salad

Thai beef salad from 3 Chefs: The Kitchen Men (Whitecap, $26.95).

Photograph by: Handout
, Whitecap Books

Thai beef salad

Serves 4.

The next time you have leftover cooked beef, preferably a medium-rare strip loin steak or standing rib roast, make this easy, good-looking main course salad. It's from 3 Chefs: The Kitchen Men, by three Toronto chefs — Michael Bonacini, Massimo Capra and Jason Parsons (Whitecap, $26.95), the excellent cookbook that came first in Cuisine Canada's national cookbook awards for books published in 2010.

Unlike so many others, this is a chefs’ cookbook you can really cook from. Capra, who runs the Italian restaurant Mistura, writes that he remembers his mother deliberately cooking too much of a food in order to have leftovers. When a friend introduced him to this recipe, he recalled her leftover habit and created this salad to serve with crusty bread.

1 pound (500 g) strip loin steak, trimmed of fat

Salt and freshly ground pepper

1 medium onion, thinly sliced

1/2 red bell pepper, thinly sliced

1/2 yellow bell pepper, thinly sliced

2 cups (500 mL) halved grape or cherry tomatoes

1 bunch fresh coriander or flat-leaf parsley, chopped

1 clove garlic, chopped

1 anchovy, chopped

Juice of 1 lime

Juice of 1 lemon

Olive oil

Leaf lettuce

Season the steak with salt and pepper and grill to medium-rare. Wrap in foil and set aside to cool completely. (If using pre-cooked meat, bring to room temperature.)

In a bowl, combine onions, red and yellow peppers, and tomatoes with the coriander, garlic, anchovy, lemon and lime juices. Moisten with olive oil to your taste. Let stand for about 30 minutes.

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